Many Are Called

Between 1936 and 1941 Walker Evans and James Agee collaborated on one of the most provocative books in American literature, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). While at work on this book, the two also conceived another less well-known but equally important book project entitled Many Are Called.This three-year photographic study of subway passengers made with a hidden camera was first published in 1966, with an introduction written by Agee in 1940. Long out of print, Many Are Called isnow being reissued with a new foreword and afterword and with exquisitely reproduced images from newly prepared digital scans.

Many Are Called cameto fruition at a slow pace. In 1938, Walker Evans began surreptitiously photographing people on the New York City subway. With his camera hidden in his coatthe lens peeking through a buttonholehe captured the faces of riders hurtling through the dark tunnels, wrapped in their own private thoughts. By 1940-41, Evans had made over six hundred photographs and had begun to edit the series. The book remained unpublished until 1966 when The Museum of Modern Art mounted an exhibition of Evans’s subway portraits.

This beautiful new editionpublished in the centenary year of the NYC subwayis an essential book for all admirers of Evans’s unparalleled photographs, Agee’s elegant prose, and the great City of New York.